An Intellectual History of
Cannibalism
Catalin
Avramescu
Translated
by Alistair Ian Blyth
Princeton University Press, 2009
The cannibal--perhaps the ultimate
symbol of savagery and degradation--has haunted the Western
imagination since before the Age of Discovery, when Europeans first
encountered genuine cannibals and related horrible stories of
shipwrecked travelers eating each other. An Intellectual History
of Cannibalism is the first book to systematically examine the
role of the cannibal in the arguments of philosophers, from the
classical period to modern disputes about such wide-ranging issues as
vegetarianism and the right to private property.
Catalin Avramescu shows how the
cannibal is, before anything else, a theoretical creature, one whose
fate sheds light on the decline of theories of natural law, the
emergence of modernity, and contemporary notions about good and evil
